Caitlin Press
Chantal Gibson is an
artist-educator living in Vancouver with ancestral roots in Nova Scotia. Her
visual art collection Historical In(ter)ventions, a series of altered
history book sculptures, dismantles text to highlight language as a colonial
mechanism of oppression. How She Read is another altered book, a
genre-blurring extension of her artistic practice. Sculpting black text against
a white page, her poems forge new spaces that challenge historic
representations of Black womanhood and Otherness in the Canadian cultural
imagination. How She Read is Gibson’s debut book of poetry. An
award-winning teacher, she teaches writing and visual communication in the
School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
How She Read is
obviously constructed as a book-length project. How did it originally begin,
and what did you learn through the process?
How She Read is about the
representation of Black women across the Canadian cultural landscape and about
the ways we learn to read—words, sentences, books, bodies, images, lessons and
ideologies—in a colonial education system.
It has many beginnings…
It starts with my mother Lorraine Gibson, who was born
in Nova Scotia. She was my first book.
Her first-grade photo is on the front cover. She was the only Black
woman in our Oshawa neighbourhoods, the only Black woman in our tiny Northern
BC town. Visible and invisible at the
same time. I watched her watching people watching her. I learned her smile, her laugh, and how to
navigate the daily grind of microaggressions. She died when I was 18.
It starts with my primary, secondary and
post-secondary education in Canada. I don’t remember seeing people like my mom,
like me, in my school books, while I was eagerly spelling _ngl_sh w_rds. I don’t remember writing about a Black
person until I chose to write a grade 11 research paper on Idi Amin—only
because I kept hearing about him in the news. I didn’t see Black authors on my
university syllabi at UBC until I met Toni Morrison in third-year Am Lit,
Pecola Breedlove, The Bluest Eye. The only Black character I met in CanLit was
“the black wench” a nameless stereotype bashed and tossed around in The
Stepsure Letters, by Thomas McCulloch.
How She Read is the book I
wish I had in school. It is the outcome of a reflective process of looking
back, circling back, and retrieving what I’d missed. The writing process started
with language experiments that got me thinking about how I learned and what I
learned—the un/intended lessons. Poetry became a tool for me to think through
the rules and conventions of reading and writing in English, the very same
rules I’ve asked my own undergrad students to follow for the last twenty
years. I learned how I had come to
accept and embody the language and the rules in my composition spellers without
question, how I became a good citizen of English who missed the holes, silences
and erasures on the page in front of me as I filled in the ______s.
How She Read is
described a “genre-blurring extension” of your ongoing artistic practice. Given
this collection is your poetry debut, what made you decide to explore this
through poetry? What did you feel was possible through this project in poetry
that might not have been possible otherwise?
Over the years, I’ve created a collection of
Historical In(ter)ventions, a series of altered history book sculptures that
use mixed-media to imagine and make visible BIPOC voices that have been
omitted, silenced, erased. In most cases, I am using my materials to
investigate the book as a container, unpacking hegemonic structures and the
ideological assumptions inside the cover. For example, “My First Janson,”
(2019) is a reimagining of my first art history textbook purchased in 1991—the
canonical History of Art by WH Janson. Cut in half, pages torn and bound
together with knotted black thread, this work is a meditation on what’s missing
or misrepresented in the cannon of Western Art.
In How She Read, I wanted to write about the
mis/representation of Black women, but in non-academic ways, and, more
importantly, I wanted the women in the book to speak loudly, to discuss their
representation in specific contexts—to talk back to institutional power. For me, as a visual thinker and craft
enthusiast, poetry was the perfect vehicle to convey the many layered voices
and ideas communicated across the book.
Poetry is sculpture made of marks and spaces,
inclusions and omissions. Poetic form can be rigid, bound by rules and
conventions. Poetry can be flexible, pliable, blurred with other genres of
writing. Poetry allowed Harriet Tubman to talk back to the writer of a
Historica Canada online encyclopedic entry, to fill in the _______s in her
sassy oratorical style. Poetry allowed beautician-semiotician Viola Desmond to
write a ‘cease n deist letter’ to Canada Post, to school them on what’s not
included in her iconic smiling postage stamp. Poetry allowed Delia and Marie Thérèse,
two naked slave women to hold the space at the center of the book, to speak
from a painting and a photograph, not as exploited subjects or pornographic
objects, but as philosophers dialoging about the art and science.
Finally, poetry allowed me to engage directly with my
literary heroes. The work is buttressed
by Black women writers, Canadian and American, past and present, Audre Lorde,
Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison, Afua Cooper, M. NourbeSe Philip, Rita Dove, Lorena
Gale, Canisia Lubrin and Chelene Knight, to name a few. I am indebted to the
brilliant women in this book—all of them.
Much of what makes the book so vibrant is a particular
kind of fearlessness when it comes to language and visual expression. How important
is the visual to the way you write poems?
For me, poems are text sculptures, so the visual is
integral to my writing process, especially for How She Read, where the
shape of each poem is informed by the content.
The cool thing about poetry is that the genre has so many forms—all
kinds of shapes, and rules and conventions.
Once I know the story I’m trying to tell, crafting the visual aspect of
the poem helps me think through the content.
For example, in the Grammar of Loss section, Homonyms
is about the final interactions between a dying mother and her teenage
daughter. It’s a reflection on missed
opportunities by an “unfinished woman.” I thought of the mother and daughter as
two words that sound the same but are spelled differently—so the sestina seemed
like a good choice in terms of poetic form. But, after writing the poem in the
conventional sestina form, fixing the repeated words at the end of each line,
the poem looked long and clunky. Visually it was screaming, “And now for the
crafty sestina portion of this book…” So, to capture the loss and
unpredictability in the story, the cutting, the scratching, the snapping, I
chipped away at the poem and removed all the unnecessary words. That meant the
homonyms no longer landed at the ends of lines.
This resulted in a poem that looks and feels like an unfinished sestina.
Reciprocal Pronouns is another kind of visual poem. It
is comprised of three circular stanzas that overlay each other. You can start
anywhere. It can be read clockwise and counter-clockwise. This is a poem about
seeing, about subjectivity, about reading. It’s a different poem when read
silently in your head and when read aloud.
The experience of reading the poem, the meditative undulating way the
reader is pulled into the work, has everything to do with its visual form. If the poem was written in vertical
stanzas—the poem would have a linear form, a beginning, an end, and the reader
(me included) has less agency.
I’m not interested in word tricks. I love craft, I
love form. It took me years to write Homonyms. It was shelved many times until
I figured out what I had to do to make it work. The cool thing about learning
craft and breaking rules and conventions is that I can hopefully create
compelling interactions for the reader.
How She Read reconciles
some magnificent distances between erasure and reclamation, able to
simultaneously articulate loss and presence. How did the book first find its
shape? Did the shape of the final manuscript emerge through the writing, or did
you have a sense of it before you began?
Great question.
The book emerged through a what feels like a circular, iterative process
of working with holes, in words, in sentences, in stories, in voices, in
ancestry, in space, in time, in logic. It sounds so weird when I say it here,
but that’s how it felt, the writing. Every pass was a process of asking—What’s
here now? What needs erasing? And what needs filling in?
From the beginning, I knew I was writing a book about
decolonizing language (how we learn to read and write words in English) and
about how knowledge is produced and re-produce across a culture (how we learn
to read and interpret everyday objects, images and signs).
So I started with a section about rules for language,
a section about ways of reading visual images, and a section about the
experiences beyond the words and image—what Roland Barthes called the
punctum—the thoughts, feelings, memories triggered by imagery. I also knew that
the book would move from childhood experiences of engaging with words and
stories in primary school readers to more academic engagements with critical
and theoretical concepts and ideas—that the “first person” I at the beginning
would be transformed into the decolonized i at the end.
As I worked through iterations, moments from the
broken language experiments in the first section were woven and sometimes
repeated throughout the rest of the book as markers, as touchstones, as
meditations. I had to go back through
the work and think about who was speaking. That meant keeping track of my
subjects and giving voice to all the women who were speaking in my head—who
started talking to each other across the pages. This is where working with a
great editor comes in very handy.
Canisia Lubrin hovered over all the poems, while I sorted out the
details. She asked questions after each pass of the final few drafts to ensure
every move was intentional.
During this entire process, I thought about what
couldn’t be said in words—utterances, gestures—what was not meant to be read
but perhaps felt by the reader. For
example, the aubade written by the mother in “dangling modifiers” in the
Afterword of the book. The ‘shorthand’
or graphic mark-making in Aubade (Sonnet Crown) is the outcome of an iterative
process of deconstructing my handwriting down to its essential marks and
strokes. For months I wrote and erased letters, words, lines and stanzas into a
palimpsest of fourteen stanzas—an opaque block of indelible black ink. Now we
have circled back to the visual aspect of the book again—How She
Reads ends with a death--with broken language, with a question, with
blackness, with silence—with a new beginning.
Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since How
She Read was completed? What have you been working on since?
I have this file on my desktop labeled “wtf”. It’s filled with images and stories sent to
me by friends and colleagues. “Have you seen this?” “Thought you might find this interesting.”
So, I am
working on a collection of poems that look at the poetics of racist imagery
that circulates across Internet news and social media. I won’t say it’s a follow up to How She Read,
but my first book left me with a set of questions and writing strategies to
explore!
